INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS

[Paul Kainen]

While it may be profitable on a short term basis to continue to construct
and then to tear down office space, the nation can ill afford such waste.
Since ASHRAE is concerned to improve the efficiency of energy utilization,
perhaps they ought to consider conducting a much more comprehensive test.
Find a corporation or government planning to construct or purchase a
substantial amount of office space, enough for several buildings of
moderate size.  Have individual high-tech teams plan and construct these
buildings with ASHRAE (and other cooperating societies) monitoring energy
consumption, construction cost,etc.  In addition, government agencies
and concerned labor organizations would be consulted during the design
process as well as afterwords, so that the resulting buildings would be
human-friendly.  For instance, issues such as lighting need to be
considered quite explicitly and top-down as, for instance, they have been
discussed recently on the Internet: Is cost of better lighting offset by
worker productivity?  Let's not guess when we can find out.

What Sejnowski drew our attention to, MacKay's accomplishment, shows that
the modern ``high-tech'' combination of mathematics with neural nets can
handle large-scale problems.  The real challenge, in smart buildings and
other intelligent system applications, is to connect the disciplines.